Diamond Select Knight Rider 1:15 Scale KITT review

About a year ago I saw an announcement for the upcoming Diamond Select 1/15th scale KITT from Knight Rider. Being a big fan of the 80’s show, I’ve been eagerly awaiting its release ever since. Diamond Select has been giving early looks at the progress and with a few minor exceptions this looked like a pretty fun collectible to add to the toy room.

Last week I stumbled upon one at the local Toys R Us completely by chance and for the most part I’m pretty satisfied with the final product.

The first few pictures are taken from the Diamond Select Facebook page and I believe they represent the car in a truthful way. If anything, the car looks much better in person than it does in the promotional shots. If you like what you see here you will not be disappointed holding it in hand. I also have the BTTF Time Machine and although that one is a better featured toy car for the money, KITT feels much more solid and of higher quality. I’ll have videos at the end of the article showing the lights and sounds in action.

The car appears to be painted black and is very glossy. This itself is quite impressive as the black appears deep and almost wet in appearance. The finish isn’t flawless though, and that high gloss comes with a price… smudges, fingerprints, and scratches are very noticeable.

Aside from looking awesome KITT also packs lights and sound gimmicks. The audio is authentic William Daniels and the sounds from the car are nice and clear. The volume is loud but not too loud. It would have been nice to have a quiet mode option for display where the lights would illuminate with no sound effects. Things that light up: Front lights, Scanner bar, Dashboard, TV’s, Tail lights, and of course KITTS dashboard mounted voicebox.

If you notice in the previous pictures the dashboard stickers look sloppy. My car was just as bad when I opened it. Diamond Select Toys includes not only stickers for the license plate (which rotates to go undercover!) but they also include a complete extra set of stickers for the dashboard! OK I can live with that as it lets me be a perfectionist and apply my own stickers, or just keep them as spares for when the factory applied begin to peel off.

What I don’t like is how the stickers are cut too small for the light up sections of the dashboard. No matter how the stickers are applied there will always be a noticeable gap. I tried to reduce the gap by taking it all apart and painting the outside of the clear pieces black. There are actually mold lines on the plastic showing exactly where to leave unpainted. The result is much improved IMO. It’s a little sloppy because I hurried and reused the stickers a few times but for now it bothers me less than crooked stickers and light gaps. When I decide to use the spare stickers I’ll clean it up some more.